The Black Book James Patterson Series

[Smacka Shock]

Inthe rest of the interview, Patterson talks about (and attempts to further defend) how his publisher wanted to trick readers into thinking the author was black by not putting his picture anywhere on the books. You can read the full interview here.

Patterson did not receive any flack. In fact, he was rewarded with a Hollywood contract for a couple of movies. Morgan Freeman winked at the misappropriation by starring in Kiss the Girls (1997) and Along Came a Spider (2001); Tyler Perry reprised the role as recently as 2012 in the doomed attempt at a franchise reboot in Alex Cross. Luckily that ended the franchise. The first film did so poorly that its sequel Double Cross was cancelled during pre-production. Who knows how many more films Tyler Perry would have regrettably made as Alex Cross had it been a success?

People these days protest about the wrong things. Meaningless things. I love the Alex Cross books and am grateful for the well-rounded portrayal of a successful, intelligent, highly respected Black detective who loves his family, fights for justice and kicks butt! I don't care what color the author is. It is an honoring work. Get off your high horse of wokeness and fight the fights that matter. If you don't like it, don't read it. End of story.

Whatever Patterson\u2019s writing process is, he\u2019s treading on dangerous ground in the Twitter era/Wokeism. Even though readers might have turned a blind eye to Patterson authoring Cross in the 90\u2019s (or perhaps they just didn\u2019t have the \u201Ceyes\u201D to see that something might be wrong with it), the current climate makes a few of his critics uneasy.

\u201CNot only is the typewriter the same, but the railcar the ghostwriters ride to work in is the same, the schools their children go to are the same, the drinking fountains are the same\u2026\u201D he trailed off.

Also, somebody warn him that the French word for \u201Cghostwriter\u201D is fantome ecrivain, which is also the word French people use as their n-word. Thank you to Reddit\u2019s r/Today I Learned for explaining how the usage came from ghostwriters being compared to slaves.

James Patterson is the latest author to come under fire for misrepresentation, writing from the perspective of another race. Patterson \u201Cwrites\u201D the Alex Cross series from the realistic, first-person point of view of an African-American detective in Washington DC.

Some say calling out Patterson is long overdue. Some say he should get a \u201Cfree pass\u201D because he\u2019s been doing it since 1993. Others say that free pass comes because Patterson is white and his franchise is so successful.

One thing is clear\u2026Patterson doesn\u2019t see anything wrong with it. Take his actual interview with longtime journalist Claire Allfree (Telegraph, Metro) where he actually defends and applauds himself for creating Alex Cross:

\\\"When I started writing, every Hollywood movie had a black guy with a boombox on his shoulder. I grew up in a small town that was heavily black; I had a lot of black kids as my friends. So do I have the right to write a black character? Sure I do.\u201D

So that would demonstrate that way back in 1993 his publishers would recognize that there wasn\u2019t something quite right with Patterson writing for Alex Cross. They either knew it was \u201Cwrong\u201D and decided to lie by omission or they were just trying to avoid any negative feedback, however small it might have been.

Yet, Morgan Freeman and Tyler Perry have never spoken out about their decision to play Alex Cross in those films. But has anyone ever asked them the tough question: \u201CIn today\u2019s climate, do you regret playing a black character originally written by a white author?\u201D Maybe they never will be asked that, but maybe they should.

Let\u2019s try this on, though. I wonder what their reaction was to recent comments by James Patterson where he said that it\u2019s \u201Cincreasingly difficult for white male writers to obtain jobs in publishing because of racism.\u201D

For those of you keeping track, Patterson\u2019s comments are not only entirely misguided and based in his white privilege, but factually incorrect. In a 2020 study by The New York Times Opinion desk found that 89% of all books published in 2018-2019 were published by white authors.

And how about Freeman and Perry\u2019s own industry, film and television. Have whites been cut out there due to racism? A study by the Writers Guild West found that 77% of all screenwriters are white and of them, more than 50% are male.

What do Freeman and Perry think? Do they still silently support Patterson? By not speaking up, that is exactly what they are doing. They must agree with him. Can they relate to Patterson\u2019s plight as black actors who struggle to find meaningful work in Hollywood due to systematic racism in the film industry?

Perhaps their entire success within the last 30 years is due to the fact that before Patterson wrote his first Alex Cross books, they were just cast in movies as \u201Cguys holding boomboxes on their shoulders.\u201D

But God bless the interviewer Sarah Baxter, who in that original notorious interview with James Patterson for the UK\u2019s Sunday Times, actually did press him to further account for Alex Cross specifically.

Written by Caron, Black Book is about a Chicago detective with amnesia from a near-fatal gunshot who learns he is a murder suspect, but realizes things may not be what they seem when he finds a mysterious black book that contains the secrets of the city. The novel is set to be published in 2017 by Little, Brown & Company.

Moonlighting creator Caron was recently under an overall deal at 20th Century Fox TV where he served as executive producer on the FX drama Tyrant. Before that, he spent more than two decades at CBS TV Studios and predecessor Paramount Network TV. There he created and executive produced the NBC drama Medium, which ended up its run on CBS, and the praised but short-lived CBS series Now and Again. He is repped by WME, 3Arts and Ziffren Brittenham.

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